When Dane Laffrey (Design, 2004) stepped onto the stage at this year’s Tony Awards to accept Best Scenic Design of a Musical for Maybe Happy Ending, it wasn’t just a career milestone, it was a Broadway-sized triumph. From humble beginnings, painting carpets in a Newtown warehouse to designing world-class theatre in New York, London, Tokyo and beyond, Dane has built a reputation as one of the most inventive and fearless scenic designers working today. With a career that continues to push boundaries, he reflects on his design journey that began with a model box in the NIDA foyer.
What first drew you to theatre and in particular Design as a profession?
I suppose it was my outlet as a slightly lost junior high kid; it was the thing that I found and thought “Oh. All of these feel like my people. This feels right in a way that nothing else does.”
Prior to coming to NIDA, I went to a boarding school in the States for a couple of years where I was able to declare an interest in Design because, by that point, I understood that I was not an actor, which I think is a distinction that most people who are young and have an interest in theatre have to come to terms with at some point (or they don’t).
I briefly went to a university for two weeks and I was like, “This this isn’t it. This can’t work.”
Then I came across NIDA’s Design program. At the time it was advertised as an incredible, vocational three-year training program, and I was like, “Now we’re talking, this is what we want to do.”
I went there to be interviewed by the Head of Design, Peter Cooke AM (Design, 1974), he was the first person who didn’t blow smoke up my ass because I was a young 18-year-old who had an unusual aptitude for an esoteric discipline. Peter was like, “Oh, no, this work is terrible.” He called it “Prosaic”, and I was so shocked.
At first, I was like, “Oh, what a disaster”, because I’d flown down there with a model box in a steamer trunk. Then he called the next day said, “We’d like you to join the program.” I came to understand that this is part of his independent pedagogy wherein you are challenged.
I look back on that whole period and think, “Thank God”, because I don’t know that it’s the same. You just can’t talk to students like that anymore. And controversially, I get it, but I needed to hear all those things. I really needed to hear that.
Why did you decide to focus on scenic design?
While I was at NIDA, and while I was working in Australia, and frankly for the earlier years of my career here, I did both sets and clothes regularly, and that’s not the normal way of working here (Broadway). There’s a handful of us who do it, but I would say I’ve been a bit siloed in the scenic design world. Mostly, it’s to do with the fact that at this point all the projects I do are of such a large scale that doing both at the same time is too much.
I think to do costumes well you have to spend time with the actors. You have to engage in interface and become a part of that, which I love, but it’s it often runs counter to what the set designer needs to be doing at that time.
If I had to pick one, I would choose scenic design, because I’m attracted to the world building aspect of it, and I think that it is inevitably the closest relationship with the director as well.
I’ve known the director of Maybe Happy Ending, Michael Arden, since before I came to NIDA. At this point I’m in the unique and very fortunate position to be basically working exclusively with him for anything I know about in the future. That’s the path we both want to be on, so it’s great.
Were there any designers or shows that you admired growing up that inspired you to choose this path?
I don’t think I really started to seriously consume live performance until I was in Australia. It was facilitated by NIDA, but also it was seen as an absolute mandate that we would be dragged to the opera every couple of weeks, and we’d have to go see every show at Sydney Theatre Company and at Belvoir and at Griffin. That’s when I started to be able to follow certain designers and see all the work that was happening.
There was always great design going on in Australia and there’s an interesting Nexus there of artists who are working globally in a way that is not always the case in New York where we tend to move between New York and London.
At the time Dan Potra (Design, 1991) was doing interesting things and Justin Kurzel (Design, 1995), and we had these great teachers in like Brian Thompson. There was something so thrilling about those guys and their approach to work that they were making.
One of the things that was so cool about NIDA being a smaller pond and the centre of training for an entire industry, was that all the designers whose work we were seeing would then come and teach us. That was such an interesting point of connection the way that it was set up so that we would have exposure to all these different working artists who were in the middle of these projects.
So that was a wonderful broad set of influences that were available to us because of the unique setup of having access to all this stuff and then access to the people who were making that work. That was great, I loved that.
Are there any lessons from NIDA that you still carry with you today?
Constantly. Truly, it is about work ethic, and inside that an ability to be quite relentless with yourself. To learn the importance of editing yourself, of not being precious with your work, these were all things that were carefully instilled in us that I personally, and I think a lot of graduates of that program, take away. Those of us who went through that training have a shared ability to be pretty hardcore about the work when we needed to because it was very, very intense. It was longer hours than I work now.
There’s also a sort of warmer and fuzzier way to think about that, which is that we were really supported and we were not left alone being expected to work this many hours and days. It was it a burden shared by our instructor, and there was something really important about that.
I remember during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in third-year, there was a carpet that, for some reason, we wanted a very specific pattern on. And so, the determination was that the carpet would be painted. Of course, I had to go paint the carpet in a warehouse in Newtown for days and days with this stencil.
Now, this is a very ill-advised thing to do. You can’t paint a carpet. The paint won’t stick to carpet, but this is what was determined we would do, so then it gets into the theatre and there was a night of rehearsal, and all the paint starts to come off the carpet on people’s shoes immediately. Basically, the thing is getting ruined on the first night.
So, I go home at 11 PM and it’s all very sad. And then I showed up the next morning at 8:40 (the building opened at 8:30) and Peter Cooke is standing in the lobby right behind the glass doors and says, “Well, I’ve heard all about this carpet. You really should have been here. What if somebody had gone in there and you weren’t there? The building has been open for 10 minutes.” And there’s something that really stuck with me about knowing when you need to be present for something and when it’s OK to not be present. Like when you’re in a rehearsal and it’s time to walk up to the stage and confer with somebody, or when it’s the right moment to stand back and let something play out. All that stuff was introduced and instilled, and I’ve never forgotten.
It’s kind of a very long way of answering this question, but there are so many of those lessons and I think about them all the time.
Your career has taken you from Sydney to Oslo and then to Broadway. What are some of the most defining or surprising moments for you?
Working overseas is interesting because I kind of started in the American theatre professionally as a foreigner, or as an oddity. When I came back from Australia, I think people basically understood I was American, although at the time my accent was crazy because I’d spent five years down there immersed.
I had to learn about how theatre worked here, because I didn’t totally know, and I had a lot to learn. I’m glad I had that experience because I think that it has better prepared me to go and do shows in Japan or go and do shows in London or do shows in Germany or wherever because it is always functionally the same, but subtly different in a way that it’s meaningful to pay attention to.
That expands into the monopoly of vendors I deal with across the world. I just finished this Disney musical in London that we’ve also done in Germany and in the States, and that had vendors in Melbourne and Germany and Wales and London and Plymouth and New York and Canada. All of those places have their own subtle cultures, and they expect different things from designers; and so, having a flexibility around interface is useful.
I think some of those things surprised me slightly, but all these things feel, in retrospect, like it’s all part of a path that feels like a longer path, even though, if you look at it from the outside, I finished school less than 20 years ago, and there’s a lot has happened, but for me it has felt like a journey.
What are some of the differences between theatre in New York and Sydney?
They’re almost incomparable. I have such a soft spot for Sydney. I love it. I come back regularly to see friends and I see the work that continues to happen.
It’s just scaled down in every possible way; in the size of the community, the opportunities, the number of institutions, and I think those institutions are doing really interesting work and continue to have identity and I’ve always appreciated the idiosyncrasy of space in Sydney, in theatres. I never worked in a proscenium theatre except at NIDA while I was there because there aren’t any.
There’s an expectation that the properties we do here [in the US] spawn globally and end up in Australia, less so the other way around.
I think one of the things that really drives us here is that you’re always trying to build something so that it can have a future life. That didn’t seem immediately possible in Australia at the time.
That’s been a thing that, as my career has shifted, I’ve gotten a bit more used to. It affects the volume of the work that I can take on because I have an expectation that I can look at a thing and be like, “OK, so we’re gonna have to do that one four times. That’s gonna happen out of town, then it’s gonna happen in New York, and then we’re gonna do a tour, and it’s probably gonna go to London.”
Each of those times it shifts a little bit, we’re doing two new Maybe Happy Endings at the moment, and it’s not just copy and paste, it requires my active involvement to make these things work in different ways. That’s partly because I have an interest in allowing things to be bespoke to a space where possible, so inevitably spatial adaptation is required when you move into a different space.
There’s a lot of money being invested and the only way that gets made back is if these things have a long life. That is the commercial model that we function in here.
We’re actively trying to make it a little more homespun in that regard, while wrangling huge ad agencies in this and PR people in that space. The idea being that you come back to a model where the artist is the producer and the generator and the force behind the thing and I think that’s why some of that work in that kind of co-op space has such a strong identity because it’s all being made by everybody walking in lock step in one direction.
Congratulations on winning a Tony Award for Best Scenic Design of a Musical! How does it feel to have your work celebrated on such a large scale?
It’s amazing. I must admit I have wanted one, it is meaningful to me.
There are many things about it that are somewhat circumstantial, insomuch as how any award works. If you look at the Oscars at the Golden Globes, at the Tonys, there are things that can win and things that can’t win.
However, I am thrilled that my first Tony was for this show. I believe in the show so much. I believe in the work we did so much. The show almost didn’t happen a few times, it nearly got killed by COVID.
It’s a miracle that it occurred and a bigger miracle still that it has been embraced the way that it has both in awards and in commercial success.
Truly, it’s hard to parse because I personally wanted to win that award, I really did, but I’m also a producer on the show and I really, really wanted the show to win ‘Best Musical’, because that is an award that really means something for the life of a project, for its future, for its longevity on Broadway and for its future iterations internationally. That was the thing that I really, really wanted to see happen.
And I was delighted to also win a Tony for Best Scenic Design.
What is your relationship like with the creative team on Maybe Happy Ending?
We’ve talked about my relationship with Michael the director, but I have known the lighting designer, Ben Stanton, since I moved back from Australia in 2006. The first shows I did in New York in 2007, he lit both of them. We’ve been working together for nearly 20 years, and I’ve lost count of the number of shows.
Very similar with the costume designer Clint Ramos. We’ve done a bunch of things together. We share a studio together. We’ve taught together. Peter Hylenski the sound designer; many, many shows. And, of course, I share the Tony with George Reeve who did the video and is somebody I’ve worked with far less, but has been somebody who, the second we started collaborating, I was like, “Oh, you’ll have to do them all, and this will be forever.”
I think that the years of work together and shared vocabulary and shared experience, you cannot actually put a value on that body of work. So rarely are the things that are really celebrated or really meaningful the result of a first-time collaboration between people who would never then work together again. A much as what we do is kind of scattered and finite, it’s also so improved by people working together over an extended period, across multiple projects and really getting to know each other, aesthetically challenge each other, question each other, learn from each other. That has extraordinary value.
Would you walk us through the Scenic Design journey for Maybe Happy Ending?
We did the show for the first time in Atlanta in 2020. It just squeaked by its run before the shutdown (COVID19), but subsequent conversations about it were tabled for a while. We did a different production there because it’s quite complex on Broadway and something that would be technically unsupportable in most other scenarios, certainly in a regional theatre.
So, we did a version of it that had a very similar aesthetic vocabulary and it looked similar. It moved very differently; it was much more reliant on people and less on machinery.
We were drawn to real world references. We didn’t want it to feel science fictiony, we didn’t want it to feel invented. We wanted it to feel familiar and even a little nostalgic. That was always the aesthetic driver of what the show looks like.
The way it moves is achieved largely through these moving neon irises which have been in every iteration of the design, and they’re the thing that holds the audience’s experience of it and teaches them how to watch it.
When we were adapting it for Broadway many of those references held true, but what we had to do was an exercise in which we broke down the number of people that were involved in its Atlanta production and what they were doing.
We realised that there were moments where we had wardrobe crew striking props and stage managers pushing stuff around. None of this is possible on Broadway. It’s very restrictive in terms of how The Stagehands Union designates work, so there are designations between what is carpentry work, which means scenery and props. Anything that has an electric element in it needs to be handled by an electrician. These are all separate people and so we broke it down and realised that it would have taken an outrageous number of people, completely unsustainable, even for an enormous show.
So, we then went through an exercise of trying to preserve all the same elements of the Atlanta production, but in a fully automated version, and that was so astronomically expensive that it was abandoned.
Part of the reason this was all possible is because we were in the middle of the Pandemic and doing little else, so there was a lot of time to iterate on this particular design. It’s a show that Michael and I wanted to get into town as soon as we could and felt that it had so much potential if we could just crack the code of how to do it inside the Broadway model.
I was in Tokyo and I said to Michael, “We have to design too many shows, so you have to come to Tokyo but it’ll be good, because it’ll help us,” and it totally did. Being immersed in that world, I mean, the show takes place in Seoul. Seoul and Tokyo are not the same place, but they share certain aesthetics and sensibility.
You feel like you’re in the future in their absolute excellence at efficiency, and just the sheer scale of it, the super metropolis of it all, it is amazing. We designed a bunch of it sitting in this 57th floor workspace in a building where you could really see the city laid out in front of you and glimpsing all of these little snippets of architecture was so helpful in terms of getting the feel of it and the look and the texture, but then we also spent enough time with it to feel like we could settle on a different way for it to move. It would maintain the spirit of what we had made and we knew what we absolutely, categorically had to hang on to and what we could let go of.
We would not have been able to do that if the pause of the pandemic hadn’t happened.
The show was a real sensation in Atlanta. It echoed the Broadway experience: when it started nobody knew what it was and then by the end of it, you couldn’t get a ticket.
How much did you collaborate with people behind the scenes like the set, the builders and the engineers?
Very intensely, and through the whole process. Our production supervisor who is also the owner of a very famous scene shop called Hudson Scenic and his name is Neil Mazzella. He’s kind of a Broadway legend. He has been with the show and with us from the very beginning and supported our every effort along the way, including looking at a really crazy first design for it in 2019 that was basically deemed impossible, which I sort of loved. But they went through the cost and it was such a shocking number that everybody’s like, “No. We’re not doing that. So what’s next?”
He went through the process of like, “Great. So, we can’t do that. What do you have on the shelf that you could send us that we could work with?” And I think that was interesting because he was like, “Well, I’ve got a turntable about this big and I could send you some winches that we could use for these irises,” And there’s still a turntable in the show.
You realise, every single thing that we do in the theatre, it’s all unique. Nothing is being mass produced. Everything is encountering a fresh problem. So yeah, I collaborated incredibly closely with them for years. It’s essential.
There is inevitable physical separation. The dream of NIDA where you’re all in the same building together and drawing away, and then you can just print it out and walk it down and ask, “Could it be like this?” I wish we could work like that. That would be so amazing, but we are inevitably siloed and the scene shops are not in New York City, they’re all a drive away.
In Maybe Happy Ending there’s this reverse guillotine that comes out of the floor and makes the bottom of an iris sometimes, but it has to pass through a turntable. It’s a super wonky proposition, but I actually talked to another technical director I was in tech with at the time, who’s a very, very smart man, and I was like, “This is a crazy notion” and he was like, “I think technically that’s possible. Here are the things you’d have to avoid.”
So, when I presented that to the shop, I was able to say, “I know, I know, I know. But if we think about it this way and this way…” And sure enough, the conversation didn’t stop dead. It’s so beneficial as a designer to have as much knowledge as you can, and it’s hard. Nobody teaches that. I didn’t learn the first thing about stage automation at NIDA, we were much more interested in the hands-on, tactile stuff that felt like we could achieve either in scale or in our real productions.
I couldn’t have told you how something moves across the stage. I’ve had to learn that from scratch in my professional career and that’s been largely from doing shows that have increasingly more things in them. And then, one day, I kind of turn around and go, ‘Oh my shows are the most complex shows in New York. How fascinating.’
What advice would you have for anybody that’s considering pursuing a career in Scenic Design?
I think there is blanket advice for anybody considering a career in the arts, which is sort of a cliche, but you have to really need to do it. You have to feel that it’s impossible for you to do anything else because it is hard to get started and I think it’s increasingly challenging.
When I moved to New York, you could live in York City and be poor and kind of make it work, and I don’t think that’s possible now in the same way. The city has almost become impossible for artists starting out. I think it’s really a shame because it is the kind of Nexus of that in the United States, and certainly for theatre. But it’s a playground for billionaires and bankers, and it is not friendly to young artists in the way that we think of it in the 70s and 80s. Even when I moved here in the early 2000s, it was quite different.
All of which to say, your passion has to be for the work. That that will trump any of the inevitable practical challenges you will encounter. One just has to put that sort of caution out in the world, which nobody ever wants to hear. I think it’s great. Keep believing because that’s the only way.
The other thing I would say is that I have always believed that everything is about people and relationships, and for me it ties a lot to directors. It also ties to other designers; lighting designers are important to my work and there’s many of them that I love working with.
It has to be an artist who speaks the same language, otherwise, I just can’t function artistically. Finding and understanding and building those relationships and connecting with the people that you see eye to eye with or that challenge you, but you admire… Hang on tight to that.
That’s the key to the business, to build a family because there can be a transient quality to it, and moving from project to project works for some people. It’s never really worked for me.
I want to feel like it’s a family coming together to do something. We’re not together all the time, but when we come back together, we know what to expect. We know what we’re going to do. We’re going to base it on a lot of shared experience and that’s when I feel like what we get to do this is amazing. It’s not lonely, it’s not transitory. It feels like a long, multiyear, multi decade conversation, and I think that’s really inspirational.
Header image: Dane Laffrey (Design, 2004) photographed by Stephen Mack.